1. Technical Field
The present invention relates to encoding and decoding of video and more specifically, video encoding methods, video encoding apparatuses, video decoding methods, and video decoding apparatuses by using block merging.
2. Description of the Related Art
Conventional video compression uses inter prediction and intra prediction techniques designed to remove redundancy between pictures for improving compression efficiency.
Video encoding algorithms based on intra prediction compress a video by removing temporal redundancy between pictures, where motion compensated inter-frame prediction is a typical technique for this purpose.
Motion compensated inter-frame prediction technique generates a motion vector by searching at least one reference picture located before and/or after a current encoding picture for a region similar to a current encoding block. It applies DCT (Discrete Cosine Transform) to residues between the current block and a prediction block obtained from motion compensation by using the generated motion vector. The result of DCT is transmitted after quantization and entropy encoding.
In case of motion compensated inter prediction, motion vector is generated by dividing a picture into a plurality of blocks having a predetermined size and motion compensation is performed by using the generated motion vector. Individual motion parameters for the respective prediction blocks obtained from motion compensation are transmitted to a decoder.